That he appreciated his predicament and fought desperately to extricate himself is shown in various ways. Wirt declared, at the time, that “he has blasted his prospects of future advancement,” and Adams described him as a “drowning man.” But the most conclusive evidence of Calhoun’s desperate efforts is to be found in the numerous notations in Adams’s journal. The first entry is to the effect that he had “received a letter from John C. Calhoun ... relating to his personal controversy with President Jackson and William H. Crawford. He questions me concerning the letter of Gen. Jackson to Mr. Monroe which Crawford alleges to have been produced at the Cabinet meetings on the Seminole War, and asks for copies, if I think proper to give them, of Crawford’s letter to me, which I received last summer, and of my answer.” It is characteristic that the only comment of Adams is an impartial damnation of the trio, Jackson, Calhoun, and Crawford, and especially of the Carolinian for his “icy-hearted dereliction of all the decencies of social intercourse with me, solely from terror of Jackson.” But the day following, we find Adams delving into his diary of 1818. “I thought it advisable,” he writes, “to have extracts from it made of all those parts relating to the Seminole War and the Cabinet meetings concerning it. As the copy must be made by an entirely confidential hand, my wife undertakes the task.”[272] A little later[273] we find a Mr. Crowninshield applying to him on behalf of Mr. Crawford for a written verification of the Cabinet incident. And four days after that we have Calhoun writing again “requesting statements of the conduct of Mr. Crawford in the deliberations of the Cabinet upon the Seminole War.”[274] The same day Wirt[275] informs Adams that he has received a similar note from the Georgian, and asks for a conference. That night Adams went to Wirt’s lodgings on Capitol Hill and found him in bed and asleep. He was awakened, however, by a fellow lodger, and a four-hour conference followed, with Adams reading the former Attorney-General the letter from Crawford and the answer sent, and also from the Adams diary of May to August, 1818.